In June, ImageSource was named Premier Partner of the Year, 2012 for the Western Region by Fujitsu Computer Products of America. This marks a whopping ninth time ImageSource has earned this status.

You could say, without question, that ImageSource likes Fujitsu scanners. We like them because Fujitsu invests in R & D and quality control to ensure an exceptional product line that continually evolves to meet the demands of an ever changing capture landscape.Continue reading →

As the Fourth of July approaches, we reflect on the formation of our government and the fact that the 3 branches of government are co-equal, as laid out in the first three Articles of the Constitution and several amendments. If you think of Capture, Content Management Repository and Business Process Management (BPM) they are the three pillars of successful ECM in the enterprise. Having one without the other does not give the enterprise the full benefit and ROI the technologies have to offer.

Sometimes explaining the value of utilizing all three of these to customers can be challenging. So, here’s a fun and simple way to think about it: The concept is best illustrated by the game, “Rock, Paper, Scissors“, which is a game everyone knows. Depending on circumstances, each application has a chance to provide more ROI than another one, but without one the other cannot truly provide processes efficiencies. Just like our government and if any one branch vetos or stops a bill.Continue reading →

ImageSource is approved for their fourth Oracle PartnerNetwork Specialization achieving the Public Sector Knowledge Zone. This distinction highlights a partner’s ability to focus on serving the information and technology needs of the public sector, with a powerful combination of technology and comprehension.

The Public Sector Specialization recognizes Partners that have demonstrated their ability drawn from Oracle’s portfolio of software and hardware solutions to solve unique public sector needs. ImageSource achieved the Public Sector specialization though testing that demonstrated an understanding of Government technology challenges and through validated solutions and customer references.

As a leading integrator for Enterprise Content Management technologies, ImageSource has been providing business efficiencies tools for the public sector since 1995. With extensive ECM experience in city, county and state governments, solutions include imaging and document management, records management, web-content management, workflow solutions, Higher Educaiton solutions, agenda management and much more.

The three previous specializations ImageSource earned were Enterprise Content Management, Service Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Manager. We are proud to add another specialization to our achievements in the Oracle PartnerNetwork Knowledge Zones and continue working on additional designations. We look forward to announcing their completion in near future.

A sizable county in the Northwest recently partnered with ImageSource on a major Universal Records Management solution. Implementing Oracle’s latest technology – Oracle ECM Suite 11g – the county’s Public Works and Utilities (PWU) led the shift to an automated system for managing records. By putting a state-of-art records management system in place, PWU is blazing the way for the county to effectively manage records and retention policies county-wide.

The impetus to automate records management at the County included a variety of challenges. They were working from an electronic digital vault for storing documents that had been developed internally and operated with antiquated architecture and technology. The indexing structure was extremely complicated so they had difficulty finding and storing information and the vault had zero records management capabilities. There was no official File Plan in place and content was kept in multiple formats and several locations; paper files, network file system and the vault.

The starting point for the project was to perform a Policy and Procedure review. From that ImageSource Professional Services delivered several reports including eDiscovery and Public Disclosure recommendations, a vault migration strategy, a metadata model and an official File Plan for automating records management with government mandates and regulations.

Once the structural foundation for records management was analyzed, evaluated and a governance plan put in place by ImageSource, the technology implementation was the next step. Oracle 11g was selected as the infrastructure for several reasons. Recently redesigned, Oracle ECM utilizes JAVA programming technology for its ECM suite, providing the most recent Oracle technology and a solid foundation for years to come. 11g also provides a tighter integration between vertical components, which at the end of the day, provides a wider range of choices and more flexibility in architecting and designing solutions. Oracle 11g also provides a host of benefits in the context of the broader Oracle line-of-business platforms – weather its Siebel, CRM on demand, JD Edwards or PeopleSoft – the integrations will be tight. The other Oracle products used to support this implementation are Oracle AutoVue, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search and URM Adaptors for SharePoint and the Network File System.

Utilizing Oracle ECM 11g and its Universal Records Management (URM) module, records management policies are now in place for three workgroups within Public Works and Utilities. A system was designed around the core concept of contribution folders. In order to ease transition, the Oracle software was designed and set up to mimic the folder structures that the County was using on their network file system. The contribution folders have a hierarchal structure and content contribution to the folders is extremely easy with drag-and-drop functionality. The hierarchal structure enables automatic assignment of metadata and records management policies without ever having to key index values. Direct contribution capabilities into the file structure are also available from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

The County went live with this new Records Management solution a few weeks ago and is now moving toward a completely automated records management system in PWU. This solution also provided the County with the infrastructure to facilitate Public Disclosure Requests and to automate records management County-wide. The benefits will be far reaching as the County moves into full production and later expands the many enterprise capabilities of Oracle 11g.

The City of Kennewick, Washington, looked to an ECM solution to help streamline processes. Because of changing economic conditions and a shrinking tax base, Kennewick needed their business processes to enable them to do more with their current resources. As one of Washington’s most progressive cities, Kennewick recognized that implementing a core Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system would help them meet this goal.

In a press release dated December 3, 2009, Governor Gregoire announces several significant reform measures to ensure Washington State delivers services more efficiently and effectively. One area of focus is information technology opportunities.

“Wide adoption of IT shared services allows agencies to concentrate on mission-critical needs while achieving savings through economies of scale and standardization,” said Tony Tortorice, state Chief Information Officer. “This is better for the agencies as they work with fewer resources to provide better service, and it’s better for Washingtonians who will receive better service at a lower cost.”

The Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) received the award for Best Use of Complementary Technology for a solution that automates the routing, monitoring and management of imaged checks and supplementary documents received by DFI.

“This solution assures that all checks and supplemental documents are imaged almost immediately, facilitating the rapid deposit of checks received by DFI.” said Ron Seymour, CIO, Washington State Department of Financial Institutions. “Being recognized at the Nexus conference highlights DFI’s commitment to develop technology that benefits the State of Washington,”

The City of Richland received the award for the Largest Return on Investment for an ECM solution that streamlined their agenda process by creating electronic workflows.

“Technology is rapidly changing how cities in Washington can gain efficiencies, improve processes, network and share information. Our objective is to make Richland a leader in information management,” said Jon Amundson, Assistant City Manager, City of Richland. “We are honored to be recognized by this award which demonstrates the economic benefits this technology can bring to the City and its constituents.”

What the Experts are Saying: Technical Expertise for ECM

ClickOnce is a deployment technology that enables you to create self-updating Windows-based applications that can be installed and run with minimal user interaction. ClickOnce deployment provides 3 major benefits for any .NET application: Updates are provided automatically, downloading only those parts of the application that have changed. Each application is self-contained and cannot interfere with […]

Migrations from systems like IBPM to ILINX can be fraught with issues that can bite the unwary in very bad places. However, if you are aware of such problems, you can plan ways to mitigate them and have a successful migration in the end. One issue we run into is documents that have a page […]

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about ECM migrations, with a focus specifically on moving content from Oracle IPM/Imaging to other destination systems—projects we’ve been performing a lot of lately. Our tools of choice for migrations are ILINX Export and ILINX Import, but if the destination ECM system isn’t supported by ILINX Import, […]

One of the things we’ve always done a lot of here at ImageSource is migrations, it’s definitely one of our core competencies. For a little more information on our approach to migrations, you can review my earlier post here. Lately the migrations have been more focused because most of them involve moving content out of […]

Starting with ILINX Capture v6, the Release configurations are stored within the ILINX database. In ILINX Capture v5x, the ILINX Release configurations were stored in XML files on a disk. ILINX Capture called ILINX Release using a SendAndReceivedReply IXM. The change to store the settings within the ILINX database is very useful for a number of […]